So yeah, I have no idea why it's doing it, but my PC will randomlyfreeze while playing games. Doesn't seem to have anything to do with how long I'm playing the gamefor, or even which game. Sometimes it'll freeze on a game everytime Itry to play it within 15 minutes, and sometimes it'll go for days onthat same game without a hiccup. The freeze is just that. Sound cuts out, screen stays rooted atwhatever the last image displayed was, no CTRL-ALT-DEL, alt F4, alttab, nothing will work. Can't get the computer to respond. Only way to get out of it is to restart the PC manually, and on rebooteverything seems fine. Never get a single error message, nothing. I'm at a loss. I have no idea why it's doing this.

We have determined that there are some possible heating issues (his temperature often reaches 75C within minutes of gaming, despite having a $3000 rig with awesome cooling). However, it has overheated once and it just completely shuts down (normal behaviour), this freezing is different.

As of yesterday the crashing is escalating, apparently he can only play Dragon Age: Origins without immediately crashing. TF2, L4D2, MW2, Tropico 3, everything causes a computer-ending crash. The crazy thing is there is absolutely no error message at all at any point ever.

How old are his components? I was going to ask if his power supply was old, but that would do random reboots, not this.

Is there any cooling on his video card? What about his RAM? People always cool the CPU, but often forget about other components. How well does his PSU move air? The PSU is responsible for like 90% of the airflow in the case. Where is his box stored? Good airflow means nothing if you have it sealed up.

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Originally Posted by Drake Clawfang

Aerith is clearly the most badass character ever. She saves the world. Twice. While dead. No one else can claim that, can they?

I'm gone from here for good. This place gave me many memories to take with me and shaped me greatly. I still care about you guys. I just can't stay.

A friend had identical crashes and we eventually found it to be a problem with the network card. (Only happened with the network cable was plugged in / in use.) (Also, since it seems only networked games cause an immediate crash...)

On a high end rig, I would also double/triple check the RAM and hard drives.

Have you guys been able to completely rule out the Graphics card as a source for this?

I want to say you can never completely rule out anything during a computer problem because it's a fucking computer. But an obvious candidate initially was the video card since crashing only happens during games (high video and power usage). The video card does have a cooling fan, though

However, we ran a software program that tests the video card extensively for "artefacts" and stresses it out and there was no crash.

Power is a possible issue as it always is, though I was looking at the voltages in the BIOs and they were within healthy limits. I guess that's with no load, though. I've had a defective PSU before and it would make clicking noises when it was delivering insufficient power.

IN THEORY the PSU should be fine. It's a 1000W supply and on average our PCs should run at about 850W under the heaviest loads, conservative estimate. I'm considering replacing some of the power cords running to the hardware but...I am very quickly running out of ideas.

This PC is a Fuck Money Edition so every hardware component is expensive and Aieris would rather not have to drop money on it if we can avoid it. And we definitely don't want to be wrong about which component is messing up.